‘The birthplace of hostage negotiation’: inside a groundbreaking 1973 standoff

‘We always valorize the macho soldier or the Navy Seal. Making this film, I wanted to valorize the 99lb Jewish intellectual with a big shelf of books.’ Photograph: IFC Films

Films about hostage situations rarely play out like Hold Your Fire, where both the captives and captors don’t die.

Stefan Forbes’s riveting documentary revisits a real life 47-hour standoff in Brooklyn following a botched sporting goods store robbery; the kind that makes you wonder why they never made a movie about that before. In January 1973, four Black men led by Shu’aib Raheem were planning to steal guns from John and Al’s Sporting Goods in Bed-Stuy and were pitted into a loaded and intense confrontation with an overwhelmingly white police force that brought barricades, snipers and a tank.